Preacher Problems: John Huston and Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood

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“I think I’ve been had,” John Huston remarked when he finished filming his adaptation of Flannery O’Connor’s novel Wise Blood, which was just released on DVD by the Criterion Collection. Or at least that’s the story the screenwriter Benedict Fitzgerald tells. Huston’s take was that the film had a darkly comic heart, dressed in religious trappings. He was not convinced that the main character, the staunch atheist Hazel Motes, finds God in the end. That is, until the Fitzgeralds persuaded him otherwise.

If anyone other than O’Connor was aware of her intentions, the Fitzgeralds were. Robert and Sally Fitzgerald provided her with a room for two years while she wrote the novel, parts of which she shared with them. Robert became the executor of her estate after she died and Sally edited volumes of her letters and nonfiction. Wise Blood stayed in the family, so to speak, when their sons, Benedict and Michael set out to turn the novel into film, for which they recruited John Huston as the director. The brothers and their mother were present on location during the filming in Macon, Georgia, and among other things, made sure Huston’s depiction remained faithful to O’Connor’s vision.

If Huston was had, it was only because Hazel Motes was too. Haze wants more than anything to out Jesus as a liar and false prophet and to found his own religion, the Church Without Christ, as a response to the evangelism that he grew up with and has thrived around him. The grandson of a circuit preacher who would park his car, climb atop the hood, and start preaching hellfire and redemption, Haze determined early on to become a preacher too – but one who speaks against belief, who disabuses its converts of the false notions, needless guilt, and notions of depravity.

After a stint in the army, Haze makes his way to a small southern town called Taulkinham, where he finds a whore, buys a ramshackle car, and sets out to start the Church Without Christ. As O’Connor explained in a letter to the novelist John Hawkes, Haze’s striking out against Jesus was a rebellion against a deep-set faith within him: “There are some of us who have to pay for our faith every step of the way and who have to work out dramatically what it would be like without it and if being without it would ultimately be possible or not.” With the same fervor that Haze rejects Christianity and the street preacher’s refrain, he crashes into it head-on.

So it goes with Haze, that in spite of his valiant efforts to discern what is true, he’s often unable to see what lies directly in front of him. And he’s not the only one. Much is made of eyes and vision in Wise Blood; appearances are often merely facades. The blind street preacher, Asa Hawks, who Haze follows when he first arrives in Taulkinham and later becomes obsessed with, isn’t really a man of God and isn’t really blind. Asa’s bastard daughter, Sabbath Lily, gives Haze “fast eye” when they first meet, and of course there’s Haze, whose penetrating eyes, according to Sabbath, “don’t look like they see what he’s looking at but they keep looking.” That Haze continues to look becomes his saving grace. When Wise Blood’s characters believe they have clarity, it’s often the point where they’re led most astray. Take Haze’s car. He has great pride in his decrepit jalopy with one door attached by a rope; even when it breaks down, he claims it’s as fine as any. And as they’re sputtering along, Sabbath corroborates, telling Haze it runs “as smooth as honey.”

In this vein, Huston’s partial blindness to O’Connor’s ultimate vision while filming Wise Blood may help explain why the film stays so true to the novel’s tone and intent. The Fitzgeralds’ guiding hand made sure Huston didn’t stray too far from the course, but the eccentric characters and the humor of their foibles could easily have slipped into caricature. Instead, they strike O’Connor’s unique pitch. Thanks to Benedict Fitzgerald’s screenplay, many of the best lines remain untouched, such as Enoch Emery’s description of his foster mother whose hair was so thin “it looked like ham gravy trickling over her skull.” Perhaps the only off note is the musical score, that inserts a punchy banjo riff a la the Beverly Hillbillies during interludes and whenever the town’s desperate newcomer Enoch Emery appears, as if to cue laughter. In contrast, Emery’s on-screen presence – disheveled, lonely, and naively enthusiastic – is nuanced and pitiably comedic. Had the director been more attuned to O’Connor’s religious vision, the depictions could easily have become more-heavy handed, and lost some of their comic potential if not their humanity.

To speak of O’Connor without touching on religion is missing the point, but to focus so intently on religion that the story is sacrificed would be the greater loss. O’Connor’s genius was that she could perform the balancing act and execute it with near perfection. As she confided to John Hawkes, “I don’t think you should write something as long as a novel that is not of the greatest concern to you and everybody else and for me this is always the conflict between an attraction for the Holy and the disbelief in it that we breathe with the air of our times.” That O’Connor’s characters so believably grapple with disbelief makes them more human, and their struggles more profound. In the best sense, Huston’s film breathes life into O’Connor’s characters, with a single-minded Hazel Motes, a befuddled Emery Enoch, and an elfin Sabbath Lily, along with a host of characters from this small southern town, trying to find their way as best they can.

John Huston’s Wise Blood was just released on DVD by the Criterion Collection. Bonus goodies include John Huston interviewed by Bill Moyers, an essay by Francine Prose, and an audio track of O’Connor reading her story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.”

Anne K. Yoder
is a staff writer for The Millions. Her fiction, essays, and criticism have appeared in Fence, Bomb, and Tin House, among other publications. She currently lives in Chicago, where she's at work on a novel. Read more of her work here: http://annekyoder.tumblr.com.

In 1934, the year Flash Gordon and The Three Stooges debuted, A.J.A. Symons published his great “experiment-in-biography,” The Quest for Corvo. In it, Symons, an aesthete bibliophile, describes first reading Hadrian the Seventh, an obscure Edwardian novel. The author, Frederick Rolfe, is a dazzling eccentric. Without any link to aristocracy, he assumes the name Baron Corvo and claims that England should submit to Italian dominion. Symons spends several years tracing the history of the painter-novelist from his dismissal as a young ecclesiastic to his last days in Venice. A prolific, irascible writer, Rolfe becomes increasingly frustrated by his own obscurity and failed commercial success: in the words of Rolfe's acquaintance, Leslie, he was “a self-tortured and defeated soul, who might have done much, had he been born in the proper era or surroundings.”
Reading The Quest for Corvo, from a safe distance, I relished reading Rolfe's vitriolic letters, excerpts from his novels dense with Latinate neologisms and anecdotes about his idiosyncratic behavior. Chris Offutt, though, experienced first-hand life with The Difficult Writer: his father was a Rolfe-like pornographer and science-fiction writer named Andrew Offutt, who wrote under the alias John Cleve.
My Father, the Pornographercontains reflections on Appalachian childhood, the portrait of the artist as a father, and literary analysis of mid-to-late-century genre writing. Most of all, it is a heartbreaking, hilarious, and humane exploration of the filial relationship. The father is a cankered patriarch right out of Fyodor Dostoevsky. He grew up in Appalachia, eventually getting married and starting an insurance business. He had literary ambitions from the age of 14, though. One of the pleasures of My Father, the Pornographer is watching Chris, the accomplished short-story writer and author of Kentucky Straight and Out of the Woods, attentively reading his father's work, trying to understand the man and the author. While at the University of Louisville, his father wrote a short story, “Requite Me, Baby,” or “The Other Side of the Story.” Chris writes:
In the past fifteen years, I've taught creative writing at a number of universities, colleges, and conferences. If I'd come across this story in my teaching, I would have considered it among the most promising works I'd seen. A remarkable intelligence operates behind the prose...The voice is reminiscent of contemporary writers at the time, a combination of Salinger and Hemingway. One strong note is the handling of time...If I were a teacher conferring with the twenty-year-old who wrote it, I'd be extremely supportive.
The reader asks: How much of this is filial loyalty, the impulse to protect or defend your father's achievement? The allusion to J.D. Salinger and Ernest Hemingway seems hyperbolic. It would be unthinkable that a writing teacher today would compare an undergraduate student's story in a contemporary workshop to, say, William Trevor or Alice Munro. But My Father, the Pornographer is a better book because it doesn't assume a phony “objectivity” or “distance;” it's a searching, open-hearted memoir that doesn't contrive an easy position for its author in relationship to his father.
Though he was raised in the Depression and succored on Silent Generation values (family, duty, community), he inadvertently is drawn into the world of sci-fi conventions. It was a heady time to be working in science fiction: books like Ursula K. Le Guin'sThe Left Hand of Darkness and Samuel Delany'sBabel-17 were winning Nebula Awards. Chris’s mother cuts her hair, his father doesn't cut his, and the house takes another spiritual direction:
The Bible vanished from the dining room, replaced by an equally large copy of Webster's Unabridged Dictionary. Dad gave our property the official address of the Funny Farm, putting it on legal documents, stationary, and bank checks.
Over his career, his father wrote porn that touches on a range of fetishes, quirks, and predilections. Chris, the son, tries to catalogue the hundreds of published books but becomes “bogged down in subgenres.” He cultivated a porn-author persona, John Cleve, and ultimately in 1994 alone wrote 44 novels, including Punished Teens, The Chronicles of Stonewall 7: Captives of Stonewall, and Buns, Boots, & Hot Leather.
To meet market demand, Andrew created a highly efficient system. He “created batches of raw material in advance -- phrases, sentences, descriptions, and entire scenes on hundreds of pages organized in three-ring binders.” Sections were dedicated to descriptions of the female body: breasts were “meaty pendants,” “bulging sides of her shapely creamballs,” and “thrusting artillery shells.” As he wrote, he would cut and paste the scenes into his novel and black out the used material.
Like Rolfe, he was easily offended but pathologically incapable of physical confrontation or reconciliation. Apparently, he had an entirely one-sided but long-running feud with Harlan Ellison. He aired his grievances in compellingly splenetic correspondence. When a fan wrote him describing his own wife's painful and tragic death, with a post-script pointing out a grammatical mistake in one of his books, Andrew Offutt lashed out:
Yes, of course it is nitpicking to PS an otherwise nice letter, requesting time and money-effort from a writer -- or any other human being, surely -- with the quoting of a slip on p. 24, in which “less” appears rather than “fewer.” Nitpicking and dumb, because it is designed to lose friends and intimidate people. Everything else is fascinating, though, including the ghastliness of your wife's dying.
My Father, the Pornographer manages to give full expression to all the melancholy of his life -- the intellectual insecurity, the fiercely-protected isolation, the heroic work ethic, the creative tenacity, the protean gifts -- without losing sight of just how difficult the man was to be around.

3 comments:

Thank you for your thoughtful analysis of WISE BLOOD, O'Connor, and Huston's experience. As I have been noting at my blog (http://novelsandstories.blogspot.com), O'Connor's novel is a powerful portrayal of the points in life where the temporal and the sacramental collide; yes, the process is comic, but the stakes are ineffably spiritual and significant.

This movie is so overrated – and weird. Just another arrogant intellectual’s victual. While the characters are interesting, it is beyond depressing and depraved. No doubt that the insanity of the characters is real in our world. The movie is not about religion or spirituality but a profile of mental illness on a grand scale.

It did nothing to better me or inspire me. The music score was totally inappropriate as well. The Fitzgerald’s, O’Connor’s biggest fans, had connections and influence but the story should not be touted as brilliant. Although poetic, It is one of John Huston’s biggest pieces of crap…..

What grows within you after you experience a deeply felt loss robs you of your ability to address it; the loss of the self that accompanies grieving serves only to create distance between you and those closest to you. Death not only silences the body of those it takes, but often leaves the witnesses mute as well.

Elections in the U.S. never excited me much - partly because I don't get to vote, but mostly due to the general lethargy of American voters. The brutal and breathtaking Democratic race for the nomination between Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and the rise and fall and re-rise of Senator John McCain in the Republican field changed that, however. And not just for me.While following the race to the presidency, I could not stop thinking about Thomas Geoghegan'sThe Secret Lives of Citizens: Pursuing the Promise of American Life. What had inspired this politically apathetic, almost bored citizenry to turn out in record numbers and pitch for their candidates? Another book review two to five years down the road may try to answer that question. In the meantime, Geoghegan's book might hold a candle on what may be going through the minds of this newly excited, interested cadre of voters.The Secret Lives of Citizens chronicles the politically, bureaucratically disgruntled author's move from Washington, D.C., to Chicago in search of a participatory civic life. Geoghegan (pronounced gay-gan) in 1979 is working at the Carter Administration's Energy Department and is a firm believer in the New Deal and unions. He is a self-declared "national Democrat" and an unabashed political idealist - the way teenagers are in their first relationship: madly in love with everything about the affair and deeply disappointed at the end.Tiring from all the hoops he has to jump through to push for energy policies, Geoghegan decides to go after smaller fish. He considers cities where civic participation is a relished norm, a place where people know their representatives and turn out to vote, an urban setting that breathes politics. Chicago quickly climbs to the top of his list.But Chicago is a political animal. There is nothing civic about politics in the Windy City. It does not take Geoghegan long to this find out, but he makes his peace and uses the opportunity to delve into the Founding Fathers, the constitution, the federal structure, causes of voter apathy and the New Deal, among other issues. He muses about the failures of the electoral college and the inequality of equal representation of each state in the U.S. Senate. And all in good, light fun.Geoghegan cannot help himself, however. Eventually he joins the mayoral campaign of Harold Washington - the first of two black Chicago mayors. (The second is Eugene Sawyer, who was elected by the city council to complete Washington's term after he died in office.) Geoghegan's campaign war stories and reverence for the occasion is telling of the 2008 elections.Washington's effort was historic and unparalleled. His staff brought out all the disenfranchised black votes to beat the Democratic machine. Washington clinched the nomination from two white establishment figures: current mayor and son of legendary ex-mayor and party boss Richard J. Daley, Richard M., and incumbent Jane Byrne. Then, Washington beat his own party in the elections, which rallied behind the white Republican candidate. His achievements were not only due to the South Side, but also because the white "elites" of Lincoln Park, who came out to support him.North Chicagoans like Geoghegan were giddy with excitement. They knocked on doors, led rallies, manned telephones. This was a democratic revolution.Now, it seems, the U.S. is on the cusp of yet another revolution. This election is historic in many aspects. The Democrats were down to a woman and a black man until the last primaries. The Republicans might shed Karl Rove politics and redefine their party around McCain. With a slumping economy, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, record oil prices, climate change, renewable energy and the next round of Supreme Court appointments hanging in the balance, the outcome of November elections has the potential to set the agenda for generations. All of this, it seems, has triggered an awakening in the electorate.Geoghegan must be giddy, again. If you too are excited, check out The Secret Lives of Citizens for one politico's take on what motivates people - and why it really, really, truly, seriously matters. Geoghegan's quick, 251-page stream of consciousness will grab you and paint a solid picture of America that is at once different, yet eerily similar. If you believe in, or at least hope for, change through politics, you will find an agreeable guide in The Secret Lives of Citizens, which succeeds in not taking itself too seriously while making a strong case for political participation.